DOCTOR ON A JOURNEY In an earlier Open to Hope essay, I wrote about the riveting After-Death experience of a friend I call Chief. The anesthesiologist had a heart attack […]
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Dreams Die with Your Spouse One of the hardest struggles I’ve found about widowhood is that the life you had before pretty much dies with your spouse. Well, at least […]
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The soul and grief are deeply intertwined in many spiritual and philosophical traditions. It’s only natural that after someone dies, those they leave behind will start to question and want […]
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A Child Dies of Drug Addiction Ben was an addict. That declaration is enormously painful and takes even more courage to write than Ben died at age nineteen. He was […]
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Ready to Enter a New Relationship One of the most charming questions I ever received in one of my second-year spousal-loss classes came from a middle-aged man named Sam. He […]
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Getting Over a Child-Loss There was a time when I believed that people should “get over” their grief by the 12th month following a loss. After all, isn’t that what […]
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A Pain Like No Other All loss is hard. All loss is lonely. But there is something about child-loss that puts it in a unique category. I have experienced other […]
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After our sister Jane’s death, Margie and I, working long retail hours, did not communicate very often. Although we did not speak about our loss, Margie sent me a poem […]
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Unsolved Homicides Destabilize Many Lives Homicide is a complicated loss, and its reflection resides in a constant state of metamorphosis with each new experience that follows in its wake. In […]
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Grief is Love, Joy is Love What words come to mind when we think of love? I think of emotion, devotion, adoration, and respect. Each person may have their own […]
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Open to Hope is an online community offering inspirational stories of loss, hope and recovery. We believe hope is the bridge between loss and recovery.
